SAVO Survey Finds Majority of Companies Rely on Open-Ended Comments Instead of Real-Time Analytics for Sales Insights
More Than Half of All Organizations Also Fail to Equip the Entire Sales Force With Training to Sell Smarter

CHICAGO, Oct. 23, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- SAVO Group, the market leader in sales enablement, today released recent survey results that found 58 percent of companies base their sales insights on open-ended comments from sales reps instead of real-time data and analytics. In the absence of proven tools to capture and validate the effectiveness of sales actions, the companies that focus their coaching efforts exclusively on new hires (51 percent) are missing a critical opportunity to equip their entire sales force with the accurate data and contextual training needed to break bad habits, realize new opportunities and sell smarter.

Polling attendees during the recent "Smarter@Sales: Execution" and "Smarter@Sales Operations: Ramping and Performance" webinars, SAVO also found that 82 percent of attendees admitted their organizations lack a successful prescriptive learning process to provide ongoing employee coaching and immediately correct ineffective sales behaviors. Respondents then ranked the elements that would be most helpful in resolving this issue. Ordered from most to least helpful, these tools are:

Scalable coaching programs for new and tenured reps –86 percent of respondents indicated that they felt coaching for all sales reps – regardless of how long they've been with the company – is the most critical piece for realizing successful prescriptive learning throughout the organization.

Providing sales teams with real-time direction –On-demand feedback and coaching was selected by 83 percent of respondents as the second most important piece for deploying effective prescriptive learning.

Establishing an ongoing learning process for tenured employees, and empowering sales teams with contextual feedback throughout the sales cycle –In a tie for third, 71 percent of respondents chose both ongoing learning and contextual feedback as key components for enabling prescriptive learning processes.

"These findings underscore how important it is for sales and marketing leaders to employ prescriptive learning processes that provide real-time visibility into the actions of their sales teams," said Kurt Andersen, executive vice president of sales enablement and marketing at SAVO. "By automating this process with a tool that provides ongoing training and accurate, up-to-date information throughout the sales cycle, organizations can gain insight into reps' behaviors and immediately make changes to help them be more productive without needing to scramble at the end of the quarter to correct things."

Founded in 1999, SAVO is the leading provider of sales enablement solutions. SAVO's on-demand sales enablement platform maximizes the sales team's ability to communicate value and differentiation in clear, consistent and compelling ways. Combining proven sales and marketing best practices with award-winning technology, SAVO addresses all aspects of the sales enablement challenge — spanning people, process, insight and technology. For more information, visit www.savogroup.com or follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook.